I kept a journal over the past week, to help process my thoughts. It’s not the most uplifting, but, it’s life.

8.4.11 {Donuts.}

I’m writing this while at the hospital, laying on the bed across from my grandpa. He’s been gasping for breath and finally admits that the smoking got the best of him – not that this foreshadowing would have changed anything. “There’s just nothing like coffee and a cigarette in the morning,” he always said.

He’s been around since I was born, although he’s not my dad’s biological father. When I was young, I didn’t know what a bitter and broken man he was. I didn’t know that he stormed Normandy Beach and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, only surviving because his friend’s bodies shielded him. Nor did I know that he had two children in the cemetery, and his only surviving son (Larry) was born prematurely, which resulted in visual and mental impairments. And I did not know that his first wife died of a sudden illness when Larry was only 25. All I knew back then was that he had an awesome underground pool, liked to drink “highballs” and made me cry when he dressed up as Santa.

Santa always did scare the crap out of me.

He was generally nice to me, albeit a bit cranky and argumentative. But as I grew, it became apparent that he never accepted my father or our family. I saw how controlling he was of my sweet and wonderful grandma. How he caused our family to fall apart. How my father had to tolerate years of awful mistreatment just to see his own mother. In latter days, bitterness caused me to detach, which carried along the tragic side effect of lost time spent with my grandma while she still had her memory.

So I’m sad today, but not for obvious reasons. I’m sad for my uncle Larry, who has no family of his own and whose mother died when he was young. I’m sad for him because now he’s losing his caregiver and father; and his stepmother (my grandma) has Alzheimer’s. I’m sad because he’s been sitting by his dad’s bedside for a week, without barely sleeping or eating, just waiting for him to open his eyes. I’m sad because I know that he envisions himself in that bed someday and he wonders if anyone will be sitting by his side. And I’m sad because I realize that I’ll have to go through this with my own parents someday and that thought is incomprehensible to me.

I don’t know what to say. I can’t hold it together when I see the tears welling up in someone’s eyes. I leave for a while to regain my composure and to buy some sprinkle donuts and Excedrin for Larry. And a few hundred purses for myself.

Larry turns to me and says, “If dad were awake he would yell at me to change my shirt because it has stains on it… I wish he would wake up and yell at me.” My dad shows up with a stack of To Do lists, tired and stressed, although no one could possibly tell except me. I force him to sit down and eat something. He’s always taking care of everything but himself. Just like any five year-old would, he jumps on the wheelchair scale and starts weighing himself, in attempt to distract Larry for a second. It works.

8.5.11 {Death.}

Grandpa dies. My dad and cousin are digging through files and making funeral arrangements at my grandma’s apartment. I see the heaviness in my dad’s eyes as he contemplates how to tell his mother the news and having to move her into a home. I try to distract grandma by looking through picture albums with her. Larry is in the bedroom crying and we hope she doesn’t notice. As I flip through pages, I start removing pictures of my grandpa to use for the memorial posters at his funeral. My grandma repeatedly asks what I’m doing and I tell her that I’m making a special project for her.

8.6.11 {Five poster boards.}

As I sort through eleven boxes of pictures, I attempt to summarize my grandpa’s life in five poster boards. Five, because that’s how many easels the funeral home gives you. How do I possibly divide up a person’s life like that? I look at the growing stack of pictures I’m not going to use and I realize that in the end, pictures of trips and toys and new wallpaper don’t matter. They all get thrown away. No one is going to pass those down. They won’t be displayed at your funeral. I cry for the first time as I glue his life together, picture by picture, and I think about what he did and didn’t mean to me. Then I turn off Damien Rice because he’s not helping any.

My dad stops by to bring me lunch because – he’s concerned about my stress level. He says when the pastor asked him for stories for the funeral,  he couldn’t think of one good memory. He admits that it is hard for him to listen to everyone gush about how great his step dad was. Of course, my dad is too much of a man to ever let them think otherwise.

 8.8.11 {The funeral.}

The morning of the funeral, my grandma has to be told all over again that her husband is gone. The funeral is about to start and she is the last to arrive. My dad finally walks in, holding her arm with tears in his eyes as he sees how broken up and scared she is. I have to look away.

I sit right behind them in the second row and all I can focus on are her silent sobs as her shoulders shake with overwhelming sadness. Larry’s frequent outbursts are heartbreaking and I try to stare at the ground. Later on, my grandma keeps saying that she isn’t able to take care of herself and she doesn’t know how to live without her husband. We assure her that we’ll be taking care of her and hope to God she forgets all of this by tomorrow.

I feel sad and relieved and guilty and bitter. My grandpa was a great war hero. He was a wonderful father to Larry. And growing up, we did have some good times at the pool. Our Christmases were always a blast, until we stopped having them. He made my grandma happy, for the most part. He had a lot of sadness in his life and I do cut him some slack for that.

I don’t know. But those are the things I’ll try to remember about him.

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